Search form

Main menu

Find details about every creative writing competition—including poetry contests, short story competitions, essay contests, awards for novels, grants for translators, and more—that we’ve published in the Grants & Awards section of Poets & Writers Magazine during the past year. We carefully review the practices and policies of each contest before including it in the Writing Contests database, the most trusted resource for legitimate writing contests available anywhere.

Find the perfect audience for your poems, stories, essays, and reviews by researching over one thousand literary magazines. In the Literary Magazines database you’ll find editorial policies, submission guidelines, contact information—everything you need to know before submitting your work to the publications that share your vision for your work.

Whether you’re pursuing the publication of your first book or your fifth, use the Small Presses database to research potential publishers, including submission guidelines, tips from the editors, contact information, and more.

Research more than one hundred agents who represent poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers, plus details about the kinds of books they’re interested in representing, their clients, and the best way to contact them.

Since our founding in 1970, Poets & Writers has served as an information clearinghouse of all matters related to writing. While the range of inquiries has been broad, common themes have emerged over time. Our Top Topics for Writers addresses the most popular and pressing issues, including literary agents, copyright, MFA programs, and self-publishing.

Poets & Writers lists readings, workshops, and other literary events held in cities across the country. Whether you are an author on book tour or the curator of a reading series, the Literary Events Calendar can help you find your audience.

Research newspapers, magazines, websites, and other publications that consistently publish book reviews using the Review Outlets database, which includes information about publishing schedules, submission guidelines, fees, and more.

Well over ten thousand poets and writers maintain listings in this essential resource for writers interested in connecting with their peers, as well as editors, agents, and reading series coordinators looking for authors. Apply today to join the growing community of writers who stay in touch and informed using the Directory of Writers.

Download our free app to find readings and author events near you; explore indie bookstores, libraries, and other places of interest to writers; and connect with the literary community in your city or town.

Since our founding in 1970, Poets & Writers has served as an information clearinghouse of all matters related to writing. While the range of inquiries has been broad, common themes have emerged over time. Our Top Topics for Writers addresses the most popular and pressing issues, including literary agents, copyright, MFA programs, and self-publishing.

Well over ten thousand poets and writers maintain listings in this essential resource for writers interested in connecting with their peers, as well as editors, agents, and reading series coordinators looking for authors. Apply today to join the growing community of writers who stay in touch and informed using the Directory of Writers.

Find information about more than two hundred full- and low-residency programs in creative writing in our MFA Programs database, which includes details about deadlines, funding, class size, core faculty, and more. Also included is information about more than fifty MA and PhD programs.

Whether you are looking to meet up with fellow writers, agents, and editors, or trying to find the perfect environment to fuel your writing practice, the Conferences & Residencies is the essential resource for information about well over three hundred writing conferences, writers residencies, and literary festivals around the world.

Poets & Writers lists readings, workshops, and other literary events held in cities across the country. Whether you are an author on book tour or the curator of a reading series, the Literary Events Calendar can help you find your audience.

Discover historical sites, independent bookstores, literary archives, writing centers, and writers spaces in cities across the country using the Literary Places database—the best starting point for any literary journey, whether it’s for research or inspiration.

Take a guided tour of Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Nashville, New Orleans, New York City, and many other cities. We asked authors, booksellers, publishers, editors, and others to share the places they go to connect with writers of the past, to the bars and cafés where today’s authors give readings, and to those sites that are most inspiring for writing.

Find details about every creative writing competition—including poetry contests, short story competitions, essay contests, awards for novels, grants for translators, and more—that we’ve published in the Grants & Awards section of Poets & Writers Magazine during the past year. We carefully review the practices and policies of each contest before including it in the Writing Contests database, the most trusted resource for legitimate writing contests available anywhere.

Hear from the editors of Poets & Writers Magazine as they offer a behind-the-scenes preview of the new issue, talk with contributors and authors featured in the magazine, and discuss the lighter side of writing, publishing, and the literary arts in this decidedly DIY podcast.

The Time Is Now offers weekly writing prompts in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction to help you stay committed to your writing practice throughout the year. Sign up to get The Time Is Now, as well as a weekly book recommendation for guidance and inspiration, delivered to your inbox.

Ads in Poets & Writers Magazine and on pw.org are the best ways to reach a readership of serious poets and literary prose writers. Our audience trusts our editorial content and looks to it, and to relevant advertising, for information and guidance.

Poets & Writers Live is an initiative developed in response to interviews and discussions with writers from all over the country. When we asked what Poets & Writers could do to support their writing practice, time and again writers expressed a desire for a more tangible connection to other writers. So, we came up with a living, breathing version of what Poets & Writers already offers: Poets & Writers Live.

Each year the Readings & Workshops program provides support to hundreds of writers participating in literary readings and conducting writing workshops. Learn more about this program, our special events, projects, and supporters, and how to contact us.

Organizations based in California, New York State, as well as in Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Seattle, New Orleans, Tucson, and Washington D.C., are welcome to apply for support from the Readings & Workshops program for their literary events.

Presenters and writers who need to submit a report after a P&W-supported event can get started here. Reports help us demonstrate the value of the Readings & Workshops program to funders and help us continue to offer support to writers and organizations hosting literary events.

You are here

Literary MagNet

Long before the Internet brought translation—and more often than not, the likelihood of mistranslation—to our fingertips, literary magazines were expanding our linguistic boundaries through modernist publications like New Directions in Poetry and Prose, transition, and Fantasy, which offered readers carefully crafted early translations of work by Jean Cocteau, Franz Kafka, and Federico García Lorca, among many others. The Old Deerfield, Massachusetts–based biannual Osiris (www.facebook.com/osiris.poetry) continues this tradition, having since 1972 published lyric poetry by hundreds of writers from around the world, including work translated from the French, Vietnamese, Walloon, Polish, and more. Founding editors Andrea and Robert Moorhead pay special attention to how the poems of each issue work together: “Each text echoes or anticipates or re-creates the texts that precede and follow it,” says Andrea Moorhead. Issue 78, featuring work by Astrid Cabral and Karl Krolow, is on newsstands now. Works in translation and original poetry in English are considered year-round via e-mail or by postal mail.

In San Francisco, the Center for the Art of Translation’s Two Lines (www.twolinespress.com/two-lines-journal) is one of the most prominent American purveyors of world literature, praised recently by the Los Angeles Review of Books for “expanding our access to literary voices that would otherwise be simply inaccessible to American readers.” The twentieth anniversary issue, “Landmarks,” coedited by Susan Bernofsky and Christopher Merrill, includes translations of work by writers from nearly two dozen countries, including poetry by Naseer Hassan of Iraq and Mona Elnamoury of Egypt. With a newly redesigned website and the recent addition of essays on translation, the publication continues to evolve, making it “an ongoing part of the conversation of translation and international literature,” says editor CJ Evans. Submissions of poetry and fiction in translation along with essays on translation are considered year-round for both the print magazine and the website via Submittable or by postal mail.

Hayden’s Ferry Review (www.english.clas.asu.edu/hfr), the semiannual journal from Arizona State University’s creative writing program, focuses on a similar conversation, offering a translator’s foreword with each piece and, for poetry, each work in its original language alongside the translation. Founded in 1986, Hayden’s Ferry Review (HFR) has regularly included works of translation in its pages for the past decade, adding two international editors to the masthead. The latest issue from outgoing editor Sam Martone, Issue 54, is particularly diverse, featuring English translations of work from Italy, Korea, and Macedonia. Martone sees publishing translation as part of what makes HFR an alternative to more traditional university journals, which he describes as having “a certain homogeneity in content.” Dana Diehl will be taking over as editor in the fall. Works in translation and original poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and art may be submitted with a three-dollar fee year-round via Submittable.

Fairleigh Dickinson University’s quarterly the Literary Review (www.theliteraryreview.org) has been a constant source of international literature and work in translation since its inception in 1957, with notable past issues focusing on Italian fiction and the literature of Hong Kong. When Minna Proctor was named editor in 2008, she began giving each issue a theme, such as “Artificial Intelligence” and “Invisible Cities.” “We wanted to be more consistent for our readers,” Proctor says, “in terms of what they can expect from the magazine each quarter, without losing the international focus.” The latest issue, “Game Theory,” includes translated work by Eduardo Chirinos and Utz Rachowski. The Literary Review considers submissions of poetry, fiction, essays, and works in translation year-round via Submittable; the theme of the forthcoming fall issue will be “Women’s Studies.”

In 2010 editor and publisher Katie Raissian launched the Brooklyn, New York–based literature and arts journal Stonecutter (www.stonecutterjournal.org) in order to bring together writers and artists from the United States and abroad “in the hopes that surprising connections between imaginations and geographies will form.” A native of Ireland, Raissian found inspiration from internationally minded American presses and journals such as Archipelago Books, Dalkey Archive Press, and A Public Space. Issue 4 features translated work by Aden Ellias, Pierre Autin-Grenier, and Bohumil Hrabal, as well as an interview with Karl Ove Knausgaard. Works in translation and original poetry, fiction, essays, plays, and art are considered year-round via Submittable.

Travis Kurowski is the editor of Paper Dreams: Writers and Editors on the American Literary Magazine, published in 2013 by Atticus Books. His website is traviskurowski.com.